While I typically don't see eye-to-eye with TiduZ, this is spot on. Power Word: Shield needed a real looking at, not a knee-jerk hotfix. This is quite a mess. For the time being the best quick fix is to revert the B&S change. Holy doesn't actually need PW:S spam like people adopted. Fixing Disc is more complex, but the main issue is that PW:S is too much like Flash Heal. It needs to be lower HPS and higher HPM. It needs to be something that can be tossed around, but not something that is clearly superior to your other spells.

ok so apparently a better explanation is needed. I raid in 10m and you really need to think about all the aspects of things when ya'll are making these posts saying that holy priest is the new shield spam cause their numbers are going to be outrageous. Fact, they will be FALSE numbers. Fact our mastery does not work with PW:S meaning that all our stats minus Intellect would be a complete waste. A 16k shield wont even take a full freaking hit. The amount of sacrifice is totally rediculous unless you are wanting to pad the meters becuase all our other spells are much cheaper for the amount of heal we get for our buck. A holy priest would oom in no time trying to shield spam. We dont get mana back from shields. We cant really improve our shields except stack the daylights out of intellect. So honestly think about this...in a 10m raid to shield the entire raid takes 10 seconds and cost a whopping 50k mana for 160k absorb. Please tell me which fight is acceptable to drop over half your mana in this amount of time!!!
And as for the posts stating that disc has the talent to reduce the global cd on shield to 1 sec....holy has the same type effect for renew but holy cow if we thought about spamming that our raid would be up the creek. You also have the ability to get the holy nova glyph which reduces the global cd on it yet do you see anyone doing that....I think not! The only reason those talents are there or glyphs is to give you something for oh crap gotta move and dummy back there is slow let me throw something instant on him and tanks need an instant as well cause if I stop right now I'm dead!

the whole idea behind disc has been mitigation of damage, which comes from bubbles. aegis, pw:s. because of their new "selective healing" mentality, while great for others for disc it just doesn`t work and that is because disc, with the exception of pennance, is using spells that holy uses, it has no uniqueness to it no unique spells but one. pw:s has turned into a "use this when someone is about to die at 20% hp" spell, and less of a "5 people will take damage shortly, pw:s them"

While I agree that pushing one button like an arcane mage, which also needs a rework, is stupid and boring, I think if they want us to use more spells besides the ones that mitigate damage they should GIVE US MORE SPELLS TO DO SO. otherwise it`s just as well to play holy, at least PvE wise.

Fact our mastery does not work with PW:S meaning that all our stats minus Intellect would be a complete waste. A 16k shield wont even take a full freaking hit. The amount of sacrifice is totally rediculous unless you are wanting to pad the meters becuase all our other spells are much cheaper for the amount of heal we get for our buck. A holy priest would oom in no time trying to shield spam. We dont get mana back from shields. We cant really improve our shields except stack the daylights out of intellect. So honestly think about this...in a 10m raid to shield the entire raid takes 10 seconds and cost a whopping 50k mana for 160k absorb. Please tell me which fight is acceptable to drop over half your mana in this amount of time!!!

I'm in just about full 359 and with Imp. PW:S, my bubbles were absorbing for 22k unbuffed. For ~3500 mana. So that "160k" is actually around 240k raid buffed. And with 4pc + a high-regen trinket like Jar, you don't really worry much about mana.

Originally Posted by Precursor

"Fall of therzane....." ....um what? if that woman fell , god help us it will be the second cataclysm

@spiritus - I suggest you try and control yourself when posting zealously about the evils of too much PW:S usage[...]

Translation: Stop reminding people about the intended healing design for Cataclysm.

Originally Posted by TiduZ

[...]you don't understand how disc is supposed to play and spreading bad advice that gets picked up by people who don't know any better isn't helping WoW.

Translation: I prefer everyone agreed with my own opinion of how healing design should work in Cataclysm and your championing of the developers' intended design is counter to my goals.

Originally Posted by TiduZ

It was obvious PW:S was overpowered, but using pw:s a lot is the best way for discipline to play.

Translation: It was obvious PW:S was overpowered, but, unlike the developers, I find using primarily one ability to play a game compelling.

Originally Posted by TiduZ

I think around 50% healing coming from pw:s is a good thing, and being able to heal when other classes are waiting for damage is a rewarding aspect of playing disc, or at least it was.

Translation: I picked 50% healing coming from PW:S out of a hat, even though I would have been content for the rest of my days with 75-90% PW:S i had before the PW:S nerf. Really, the only time I want to cast another spell is if I know for certain no raidwide damage will occur in the next 30sec. I'll be happy as long as I can still blanket the raid with PW:S on every big hit, which effectively reduces the tuning of a raidwide hit, which in turn causes the encounter designers to tune up the damage of raidwide hits so guilds with shield spamming disc priests are challenged, which then requires a shield spamming disc priest in all competitive raids.

Originally Posted by TiduZ

I hope you can see that when you play now but if you can't, try and keep it to yourself.

Actually, I'm just baffled by this one. Are you seriously suggesting that anything I wrote had any legitimate effect on the hotfix? I'm pretty sure that Blizzard does not make decisions because "Spiritus made a post on the O-boards." If thats the case, I need to go quick and make a thread saying "All priests name Spiritus should get Mini-Tyraels."

You clearly are more of a zealot than I assumed. You don't see a problem with the fact that mastery has gone from a good stat, to an amazing stat, to a terrible stat, over the course of 3 months during which people have sought to acquire mastery? Do you agree with blizzard that pw:s should be used in "tight situations" aka to prevent imminent death only, and that it should be extremely inefficient but high hps? I imagine you do, because you are deadset on your agenda and as clueless as blizzard about World of Warcraft.

That's all really people need to know about Tiduz. A truly stunning statement.

I'm proud that you would put me in the same category of understanding how World of Warcraft works as Greg Street and the other systems designers at Blizzard. They are some of the best in the world.

I think PW:S should be used while tank healing as intended, or in raid healing as your High HPS, Low HPM shield [with a 12sec duration]. Then, I think we should have a low HPS, High HPM shield to use for precasting raid damage [with a 15sec duration]. Then, right before, while damage is occurring, or after it has happened, we should use PoH and ProM. Then when neither of those spells are appropriate, we should use Atonement, Penance, Heal, GH, & FH.

Don't warp people's words around to make it look like they're calling themselves clueless. It's just as offensive as flat out calling them dumb. - Simca

Looks to me like someone's got Tiduz envy... Seriously dude, just as you're 'baffled' that your interpretation of one line of text Tiduz wrote implied that you single handedly caused the hot-fix, you seem to imply that Tiduz single handedly created the necessity for the hot-fix.

Anyways, OT Blizzard really just needs to make up their mind with Disc. They say they want Discipline to be all about absorbing incoming damage, yet they don't want us to use our main ability that absorbs incoming damage..... We have three spells that absorb damage, Power Word Barrier which has a decent cooldown to it, Divine Aegis which is a proc on other heals we cast when they crit or are talented to do so, and Power Word Shield, the only one of those that can be 'cast on demand'. Our mastery is completely focused on increasing the absorption power of those spells. Yet they expect us not to aim to absorb as much damage as possible, using the most effective manner of doing so. Most of us saw this coming back when the healing changes were announced at the end of wrath and asked the same question then. What does Blizzard want for Disc. We're either focused on increasing absorbs and have the tools and mana efficiency to do so, or we need re-designed somewhere.

As for the people complaining about heal sniping with shields; you guys claim that the disc priests are the 'meter hogs' and they are doing so at the expense of other healers. Perhaps you are the ones that are so concerned with your position on the meters instead of worrying about whether or not people in the raid are dying. Disc priests are only doing what Blizzard apparently intends for the spec to do, absorb incoming damage. You can't absorb incoming damage after the damage has been dealt. Disc priests are NOT reactive healers by design (design=mastery in my book). I agree that there needs to be more tools in their toolbox to give incentive to do something other than spam shields, but my opinion is that those other spells should have some sort of absorb component to them as well since that's what disc is supposed to do, it's the design of the spec.

Well i hope Blizz dont leave it too long to sort out this mess - I think they have manged to alienate the entire disc community...mastery next to useless - back to PoH spam - which sucks - putting out as little as 5 shields in my 25man raid earlier really hit my mana hard - so I had to resort to PoH spam for the DA procs alone...we are being forced to use spells which basically cant stand up to the amount of raid damage going on.

Ideally they need to rethink the disc tree and the 2/4 set tier bonus. A 'one size fits all' approach just dosent work when we are the only class with 2 healing specs.

Anyways, OT Blizzard really just needs to make up their mind with Disc. They say they want Discipline to be all about absorbing incoming damage, yet they don't want us to use our main ability that absorbs incoming damage.

Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment

Damage Mitigation will still happen and is still important even with this change, it's just not going to be the ONLY thing that the Discipline spec is going to be using to keep their groups and Raids up. There will be heals as well.

Looks to me like someone's got Tiduz envy... Seriously dude, just as you're 'baffled' that your interpretation of one line of text Tiduz wrote implied that you single handedly caused the hot-fix, you seem to imply that Tiduz single handedly created the necessity for the hot-fix.

Anyways, OT Blizzard really just needs to make up their mind with Disc. They say they want Discipline to be all about absorbing incoming damage, yet they don't want us to use our main ability that absorbs incoming damage..... We have three spells that absorb damage, Power Word Barrier which has a decent cooldown to it, Divine Aegis which is a proc on other heals we cast when they crit or are talented to do so, and Power Word Shield, the only one of those that can be 'cast on demand'. Our mastery is completely focused on increasing the absorption power of those spells. Yet they expect us not to aim to absorb as much damage as possible, using the most effective manner of doing so. Most of us saw this coming back when the healing changes were announced at the end of wrath and asked the same question then. What does Blizzard want for Disc. We're either focused on increasing absorbs and have the tools and mana efficiency to do so, or we need re-designed somewhere.

As for the people complaining about heal sniping with shields; you guys claim that the disc priests are the 'meter hogs' and they are doing so at the expense of other healers. Perhaps you are the ones that are so concerned with your position on the meters instead of worrying about whether or not people in the raid are dying. Disc priests are only doing what Blizzard apparently intends for the spec to do, absorb incoming damage. You can't absorb incoming damage after the damage has been dealt. Disc priests are NOT reactive healers by design (design=mastery in my book). I agree that there needs to be more tools in their toolbox to give incentive to do something other than spam shields, but my opinion is that those other spells should have some sort of absorb component to them as well since that's what disc is supposed to do, it's the design of the spec.

It's not like pw:s is some anomaly that is impossible to balance without adding unnecessary changes to how it works. At the right cost in mana and absorb, it can be used a lot in low damage situations, preemptively, or to save deaths, while poh/pom/penance will be useful as well. 40-50% pw:s would be a good # and achieving that is as simple as reverting the mana cost change and decreasing the absorb to the right level. The other issue, other than pws, is that poh is really weak for disc atm and particularly when DA is wasted. If you look at my holy logs from last night I had 40-50% pws usage because the absorb for the mana and all that is good but not the end all be all, while holy's other spells like poh/coh/pom and even renew somtimes are also good options, sometimes better options. Disc doesn't have a lot of options and the tuning on pws was way too good pre "hotfix" and way too terrible post "hotfix."

Simply needs the mana cost returned to where it can be used often enough to make mastery worthwhile and the absorb scaled so that with mastery its a very good spell but not the one button ticket to raping wol like it was pre hotfix.
If they reverted the mana cost to original 4.0.6, adjusted base value to be weak for holy and 23-25k absorb with ~20 mastery (369 ilvl) for disc, and gave poh a bit of a buff, I guarantee you I'd be using pw:s a lot but I'd be using pom/penance/poh as well and it would play out very well.

I agree to an extent, but I don't think they don't know what they're balancing it for. They want holy to use it. I'm not sure if they want holy to mix it in to MT healing rotation or as a mini-cooldown to save people (because holy needs more cooldowns). They also want it to be a large part of disc but don't want it spammed because that is boring game play.

The problem is that in the triage system of healing the advantages of preventing damage are out weighed by potential "over healing" and thus wasted mana of expired shields. The same thing applies to mastery. Shields are only preferable to healing if the damage the shield prevents would have been fatal. In order to make up for this shields have to be more mana efficient when used properly to compensate for when they are used improperly. Thus disc requires more skill at predicting damage, and has to be overpowered in the hands of a skilled player in order to be remotely viable for unskilled players. It also makes disc weak when you get behind. If I fail to put up shields before the damage spike our reactive healing cannot be as good as other classes without it being OP because we have all those neat shields. So we require predictable raid damage in order to function properly. This is just as big of a contributor of boring game play as shield spam IMO.

I really like the idea of a class with 2 healing trees, but I wish they would have made them pve and pvp trees or one more MT focused and the other focused more towards raid healing. The idea of a tree that focuses on preventing damage will never be balanced, especially since its the only spec like this in game. Its almost a separate role of preventer rather than healing. Meanwhile chakra and all of holy's unique abilities make it a much more flexible spec that can do just about anything better except for shielding.

Please stay on topic. It's rare that we get a Moderator generated thread with specific goals and questions to be answered. No need to ruin solid discourse with flaming each other.

In the meantime, I am disappointed that there is a viable Holy Shield Spam spec. This needs to be patched immediately or the Hotfix on B&S reverted. Despite being optimal, I refuse to knowingly take that spec to cheese my way through progression. For me, Hard = Fun. It's clearly a broken mechanic that will get changed asap, most likely with the moving of Soul Warding, or hopefully an overhaul of the Discipline Tree regarding PW:S intentions.

I'd like to see it turn this way:

- Remove Soul Warding. Period.
- Change the way in which weakened soul works. A 1-2 minute Debuff. Decreases the efficiency of Shields on the target by 10% per stack.
- Create a deep Discipline talent which makes it so none of their shields will trigger this debuff.
- Make it so that the Weakened Soul Debuff is Specific to the Priest. It will still prevent Reshielding for 15 seconds, but the 10% reduction is specific to *that* Holy Priest's Shields, not the Discipline Priest's.

This would have the following effect:

-Discipline Priests can have a powerful shield every few seconds - something that is used on CD, like Penance, or CoH, or PoM.
-Holy and Shadow Priests have powerful initial bubbles, but it is disadvantageous to use them repeatedly on the same target often.

I look at it this way:

I'm reading a book. Sure, I could cliffnotes/wikipedia it and get the plot summary and major conflicts of the book under wraps, but would I truly experience the enjoyment of reading the book as it was meant to be read? Line by line, suspense by suspense? That's PW:S right now. It's taking the Wikipedia article about the book and calling it a day.

Most people who endorse and use this gameplay are the very same people who complained about the welfare epics in Wrath. Hypocritical much, I think very much so. They're eager to use the cheesiest method to down Progression content, and then, when they're sitting in their fancy purples, they'll spout lofty ideals about how the game is meant to be played.

As for me? I'm in Blues. Our guild just had our first Normal Magmaw kill. We're super proud of ourselves. I won't be bubble spamming tomorrow night. And at the end of the night after a full 3 hour wipefest on Omnitron, I'll at least feel like I played a game instead of being a single button toting monkey in front of a screen for 3 hours.

Looks to me like someone's got Tiduz envy... Seriously dude, just as you're 'baffled' that your interpretation of one line of text Tiduz wrote implied that you single handedly caused the hot-fix, you seem to imply that Tiduz single handedly created the necessity for the hot-fix.

Damage Mitigation will still happen and is still important even with this change, it's just not going to be the ONLY thing that the Discipline spec is going to be using to keep their groups and Raids up. There will be heals as well.

It seemed pretty clear to me.

Honestly, I get what you're saying here Kelesti, but my personal opinion is that Blizzard's design intent for each spec should be reflected in that spec's mastery. Mastery for disc priests improves their absorbs. Of course we're gonna cast heals in addition to our absorption spells. Even the criminal known as Tiduz still casts heals in addition to shields. I honestly don't think any disc priest wants PWS to be the only spell we ever cast. Give us some additional spells (aka tools) to use that offer differing levels of absorption similar in HPM to Heal, Flash Heal, Greater Heal, etc that give us some choice to be made, but still allow us to play within our niche of damage prevention. By design (again looking at the mastery for the spec) Disc is 'supposed' to be a proactive healer (absorbing incoming or preventing damage), not so much a reactive healer. That's not to say that a disc healer in a 5 man should have the tools or ability to completely avoid all incoming damage to everyone in the party, I don't think anyone is asking for that. But in a raid situation, we fall FAR behind all other healing specs when we're forced into a strictly reactive healing mode like we are being now. Divine Aegis is mostly wasted when we're simply reactively healing, unless of course we're tank healing, for instance.

I don't feel staying up to date about which is the most effective and efficient way of healing is being a 'single button toting monkey'. I loathe shield spam and I will be trying this new spec tonight, because if it is the best way to help my raid, so be it.

I don't feel staying up to date about which is the most effective and efficient way of healing is being a 'single button toting monkey'. I loathe shield spam and I will be trying this new spec tonight, because if it is the best way to help my raid, so be it.

Right now Holy can do everything Disc can do and more, and do it shinier and better.

Having said that potentially the Discipline tree has a cpl of Talents that can be easily tweaked - such as Grace - whilst this procs from all heals apart from PoH & PoM - they could change it to proc on all 5 targets with PoH and Proc from the first charge on PoM - this would 'buff' PoM and PoH without without actually having to buff the spell itself thus not affecting Holy spec.

Rapture - can easily be tweaked to restore a bit more mana - same goes for Archangel.

Divine Aegis - increase the duration of the DA shields to at least 15-20secs

Mastery - this scales with PW:S and Divine Aegis. It would be nice to see some more auto proc aegis like the PoH we currently have. Auto procs from all charges on PoM would be a nice starter with stackable DA's with crits.

Please stay on topic. It's rare that we get a Moderator generated thread with specific goals and questions to be answered. No need to ruin solid discourse with flaming each other.

In the meantime, I am disappointed that there is a viable Holy Shield Spam spec. This needs to be patched immediately or the Hotfix on B&S reverted. Despite being optimal, I refuse to knowingly take that spec to cheese my way through progression. For me, Hard = Fun. It's clearly a broken mechanic that will get changed asap, most likely with the moving of Soul Warding, or hopefully an overhaul of the Discipline Tree regarding PW:S intentions.

I'd like to see it turn this way:

- Remove Soul Warding. Period.
- Change the way in which weakened soul works. A 1-2 minute Debuff. Decreases the efficiency of Shields on the target by 10% per stack.
- Create a deep Discipline talent which removes the presence of the Debuff.

This would have the following effect:

-Discipline Priests can have a powerful shield every few seconds - something that is used on CD, like Penance, or CoH, or PoM.
-Holy and Shadow Priests have powerful initial bubbles, but it is disadvantageous to use them repeatedly on the same target often.

I look at it this way:

I'm reading a book. Sure, I could cliffnotes/wikipedia it and get the plot summary and major conflicts of the book under wraps, but would I truly experience the enjoyment of reading the book as it was meant to be read? Line by line, suspense by suspense? That's PW:S right now. It's taking the Wikipedia article about the book and calling it a day.

Most people who endorse and use this gameplay are the very same people who complained about the welfare epics in Wrath. Hypocritical much, I think very much so. They're eager to use the cheesiest method to down Progression content, and then, when they're sitting in their fancy purples, they'll spout lofty ideals about how the game is meant to be played.

As for me? I'm in Blues. Our guild just had our first Normal Magmaw kill. We're super proud of ourselves. I won't be bubble spamming tomorrow night. And at the end of the night after a full 3 hour wipefest on Omnitron, I'll at least feel like I played a game instead of being a single button toting monkey in front of a screen for 3 hours.

You act like we're all just mindless idiots when were raiding when were using shields. I guess I'm just carried in my raids for being a mindless idiot.